Two in three vendor domains describe nothing: what 3,461 US growth firms call themselves

Read past the suffix and into the name itself and the index gets quieter. Only 1,151 vendor domains contain any word that says what the firm sells, and the largest pillar in the index has 946 listings but 215 domains that say "marketing".

The Wall's August 9 snapshot records 3,461 domain strings. Strip the suffix off each one and you are left with the name the founder actually chose. Test those names against 24 words that describe growth services, from "marketing" and "media" through "consulting" and "collective", and 1,151 domains contain at least one. The other 2,310, 66.7% of the index, contain none. Two vendors in three sell marketing, creative, sales, or SEO services under a name that gives a buyer no clue which.

The words that do appear are concentrated in a handful of choices. "Marketing" leads at 215 domains, 6.2% of the index. "Media", "digital", and "agency" follow, and after those four the counts fall off a cliff. Nothing else clears 90.

Descriptive words inside 3,461 vendor domains

Word in domain	Domains	Share of index
marketing	215	6.2%
media	153	4.4%
digital	138	4.0%
agency	133	3.8%
group	89	2.6%
brand	89	2.6%
creative	80	2.3%
design	60	1.7%
studio	55	1.6%
seo	42	1.2%
growth	30	0.9%
partners	25	0.7%
social	24	0.7%
content	24	0.7%
All 24 tested words, unique domains	1,151	33.3%
No tested word present	2,310	66.7%

Set the naming counts next to the pillar counts and the gap is wide in every discipline. The Marketing pillar holds 946 listings against 215 domains containing "marketing". SEO holds 265 listings against 42 domains containing "seo". Content Marketing holds 180 against 24. Social Media Marketing holds 137 against 24. Sales holds 195 listings, and 17 domains in the entire index contain "sales". No pillar has more than a quarter of its firms advertising the pillar in the URL.

This matters for one practical reason. A buyer who builds a shortlist by typing a service word into a search bar and reading the domains that come back is sampling the 33% of the market that happened to register a descriptive name. That sample is not random, and it is not the strong end of the market. Nothing in this data suggests a firm called Barbarian Group or Victorious does less SEO work than a firm with the word in its URL. The category and specialty fields on a profile carry the classification. The name carries a founder's taste.

Two sourcing notes. Word counts are substring matches against the second-level label of each domain string in the August 9 snapshot, which holds 3,461 domain records against a 3,460-listing total, a one-record variance carried through from the capture. A domain containing two tested words is counted once in the unique row and once under each word, so the individual rows sum higher than 1,151. Suffix-level analysis of the same domain set is covered in the top-level-domain briefing.